Ironically, what was really learned from the experience of PROGRESA is that having a rigorous experiment attached to your program can be great politics, as it makes the program seem technocratic and scientific and cool and adds to the symbolic value by demonstrating compliance in attendance (even where that was not an increase versus a counter-factual). This increases your ability to resist partisan political meddling in design and implementation—even if you don’t learn anything particularly special from the experiment.
